CROSS-BREEDING
THE RUINED CITY BELOW SCOURTOP ON MORAY ISLAND is by far the oldest sign of sentient habitation in the entire Moonshae archipelago, so old that it has no name in the Common tongue or any other language. The glyphs that decorate the stone table at the mountain’s root, the walls of the cavern there, and the carved tablets in the ruined public buildings mean nothing to any living creature. Abraded by the rain and wind, they will disappear before they are deciphered, Marikke thought, and the record of an entire civilization will vanish with them.
But as the exposed stone broke down in the hard weather, there were other places, underground, that stayed intact, preserved by the altitude, and the absence of any insects or rodents in the high valley. The Savage and Eleuthra lay in one of these, a stone barrow set into a grassy hillock, whose circular shape betrayed its artificial nature.
In the aftermath of the battle around Malar’s tomb, the lycanthropes had dragged the corpses up the winding tunnel into the stone porch and had butchered them there; the dead druid and their own fallen comrades. No one had dared to touch the angel’s shining flesh, and they left him where he fell, down in the pit. But they had lit bonfires out in the open, and the air still tasted like charred meat.
Now they lay around, exhausted, in little piles. Marikke picked through them on her way to the entrance of the long barrow. Tongues lolling, the lycanthropes stared at her, not remembering or else not caring that two nights before they had hoisted her in chains above Malar’s table. Her shoulders were still sore, and she could not raise her arms above her head.
But there was worse damage inside. For two days she had not spoken to the snot-nosed little girl. And now today she had ignored all her rituals and had not spoken a single prayer. She had ignored the passage of the hours, the sixteen internal ceremonies, the rhythm of the major and minor supplications. Her heart was like an empty room where the goddess had once lived. What she did now, today, for the first time since her consecration, was in someone else’s service. Great Malar had sent her on this errand, had pressed the sacrificial knife into her hands. Or no—what she had promised was not even to the god, but to the shifter boy whose form he took. She could deny nothing to the shifter boy.
She was wounded in her mind, unsure of the way forward. She ducked her head and clambered in the stone passage, not more than thirty feet until it opened to a circular chamber where the dead were buried in stone caskets twice as long as a man. There were two of them, and between them, manacled together, lay the Ffolk woman and the daemonfey, if that was what he truly was, with the brindled wolf’s pelt covering them.
At midday the chamber was lit through airshafts, a dim, uncertain light. The druid lay on her side, the Savage on his back. Marikke had brought them food and water this morning and the day before, but they were very weak. The Savage didn’t raise his head.
She kept the knife behind her, tucked under her belt, and she could feel it goading into her backside. Why did the woman have to die? Kip would not desire her death, if he were able to understand—the woman had risked her life for him. But this other, this Savage, who knew what motivated him? She pulled the hairy pelt aside and got to work. She felt no sympathy for him and used no tenderness. He had been wounded by the angel’s sword, a white seam across his chest. When he lay dying she had closed its angry lips and staunched the bleeding, though the flesh was swollen and discolored. As always it was easier to heal other people than herself—was it the goddess who had allowed her to ease his suffering? Now, in anger and despair she found herself reciting the nine names of Chauntea as she put her forefinger over the wound. Another day, another time, she would have said she was allowing the goddess to flow through her into the Savage’s skin and then deeper into his flesh. When she felt the feverish heat of his infected body lessen and subside, and when she saw his skin change its color under her hand, she would have thanked the goddess, who now cooled him and drew out the fluid from his wound, which started to weep hot, honey-colored tears.
But she had no thanks to give. Great Malar had risen. He had occupied and destroyed the shifter boy, whom Marikke had nurtured and protected all these years. The goddess had allowed it. More than that, she had required it.
The Savage lay with his eyes closed. Clinical in her interest, with no joy or thanks in her heart, Marikke pushed the yellow hair from his dark cheeks, examining the pattern of the golden tattoos under his left eye, examining his yellow lashes and brows. She had never seen him so unguarded and so near, and she was looking for clues. She studied the pale, bleeding marks on the rim of his ear, and in his nostril, and on his fingers where the lycanthropes had robbed him—though they had no use for gold, they enjoyed hoarding it. She studied the scars along his neck, and then, pulling his shoulder so that he squirmed in pain, she turned him toward her so she could see the deeper scars along his back, the pale ridges and craters of abused tissue that ran down his spine into his trousers, the old wounds he had always kept covered underneath his black clothes. Closing her eyes, she pushed her fingers into his flesh, probing him for information he had locked away, feeling the structures of broken bones between his shoulder blades where his leather bat wings had been torn out, and all the damage lower down where, she imagined, the horns of bone protruding from his spine had been shorn off, and his thick, scaly tail had been ripped out from his pelvis by its roots.
When she opened her eyes again, she saw he was looking at her, and at that moment she was astonished she had ever been deceived by him. No doubt with part of his mind always he had been cultivating the illusion, altering and shrouding himself in the perceptions of his companions—had he allowed anyone ever to be close to him? How can you be a friend to someone you don’t know? His green eyes were open now, and he was too weak to conceal himself. She saw the slit of demon red in the center of his pupils, and he looked at her with undisguised hatred and contempt, though she had saved his life. It had taken all his power to overcome the angel.
“Hey,” she said. “How are you feeling?”
Her interest was entirely abstract, she told herself. Next to him the woman stirred, the druid. She also had been damaged in the fight, bitten to the bone in many places on her arms and thighs. She also had lost a lot of blood, and she was still weak as a wolf pup. But healing her had been straightforward, a matter of sealing her wounds, of cleansing her and warding off infection. Marikke had soothed her with a sleeping charm, but she and the Savage were chained together under the wolf’s pelt, and she had woken, almost. She groaned.
With her left hand, Marikke touched her elbow near where the claws had ripped her. She spoke an empty, meaningless prayer and made her sleep again. She was staring in the Savage’s eyes, trying to read his story in his face, the source of his deceit.
“So,” he whispered. “You betrayed us after all. I told Lukas not to trust you.”
Startled, she almost laughed. What did a daemonfey know about betrayal? What greater betrayal could there be in nature than to breed with demons in order to create a master race? But even beyond that, this creature, whose true name she didn’t know, had been maimed and punished by his own kind, cast out into the world to live with ordinary mortals as if he were one of them.
“Why have you helped us?” he whispered. “Why have you drained my wound?” His voice was harsher now that he didn’t have to pretend.
She didn’t know the answer to his questions. Had he seen the knife in her belt? Did he know why she was here? It was not to cure him—he had guessed that much. No, but the Beastlord had a test for her.
And at that moment, she knew she would fail his test. Irritated, she shrugged one shoulder. “You have been summoned to the High Hunt,” she lied.
“By … whom?”
And when she said nothing he continued, “By the kitten boy?”
The red slits in his eyes gleamed and burned. “You know that’s not what he is,” Marikke said. “Not anymore.”
This was her great grief, the thought that Kip was lost to
her. Worse than lost, because his body was as it had always been, his face, his shy, tentative smile. With that same smile he had pressed the knife into her hands. The Beastlord was in him now, and if there was a tiny part of him that still survived, she didn’t know where to find it.
And surely all of them had been deceived from the beginning, from the first night they had set foot on Moray Island. If Argon Bael had made some kind of magical communication with the leShay queen, then already she’d have known all she needed to know about her lost sister. If she sent Lukas to destroy the girl, it was only as an afterthought. The real reason was to raise the Beastlord. Once that was accomplished, Caer Moray would fall anyway, and Lady Amaranth would die.
No, Marikke and Kip had been the important ones, the arrow’s point. The others had always been expendable. In which case, why had Argon Bael spared the Savage’s life there on the beach, the first night he had taken them prisoner? Perhaps even then he had recognized the devil in him, or else needed him for the High Hunt—yes, that was it. He had needed him for the High Hunt.
She remembered how the angel’s sword had divided light from darkness. “When you are well enough to run,” she said, “they’ll chase you from here.”
Among Malar’s worshipers, the High Hunt was their only sacrament, a day and a night or sometimes longer, and a clean kill at the end. In celebration of Malar’s rising, Marikke decided, this was to be the Savage’s fate, and the druid’s also—she felt pity for her sake. As for the daemonfey, good riddance, because of the lies he’d told. “I think tomorrow morning you’ll be strong enough to give them sport,” she said.
“I came for you,” he whispered. “I risked my life for you, to save you from the beasts. You and the boy. That’s why I am here. She too,” he said, meaning the druid.
Marikke felt tears in her eyes. This was not how this was supposed to be. She was not supposed to feel anything. What did he want from her? Would he like it better if she killed them now, cut their throats with the Beastlord’s knife, as he had demanded? “Tell me what you are,” she said.
“You know what I am.”
She could hear his tortured, shallow breath. Each inflation of his lungs brought pressure to his wound. “Let her go free,” he said, meaning Eleuthra, the druid. “I was the one who brought down Malar’s angel, stopped his mouth with dust. I will lead you a good hunt, I promise.” He smiled. His teeth were different now, in a way she couldn’t quite identify.
“Don’t cry,” he said after a moment. “Everything you do, you must have courage.”
Her tears and her weakness were not for him but for herself. Malar would not forgive her. For a moment she caught a glimpse of the golden elf that she remembered on Lukas’s crew, from the first days on Alaron when she had come on board, his smiles and jokes just slightly out of sequence with the rest of them, as if he always had to translate what they said into a different language and then back again before he spoke. “Don’t cry,” he said again.
She looked away from him, up into the crude stone dome. She felt the tears well up. “Tell me what you are,” she repeated.
“You have guessed,” he said. “I am a pilgrim from House Dlardrageth in Cormanthor. You guessed that much. I took refuge in Alaron.”
In the indirect light she couldn’t see the scales on the surface of his skin, so fine and delicate they were.
“My mother died in childbirth, because of what I was.” He broke off. She didn’t look at him. Then: “Free me.” She could hear the clank of the chain as he shook it in frustration. “Free her, at least. You would have died, strung up in the roof of Malar’s tomb. Didn’t you see the other skeletons, the sacrifices, hanging up there above the altar stones? A hundred years of uselessness. But it was the angel whom Malar wanted. That was a sacrifice worthy of him. That was blood worth spilling, and it was I who spilled it. Now we are quits. The girl has done nothing wrong.”
“The gods don’t care about right and wrong,” said Marikke, remembering what Chauntea, the most generous of all of them, had told her in the cave. “Only men and women care.”
“That’s your excuse, now?” His voice came tortured, slow. “And isn’t that what you are? A woman?”
But she was thinking about the daemonfey and his relations with the wives and daughters of the rich men of Alaron. Before, she had been disgusted to hear of these liaisons, had thought of them as predatory, compulsive, and immoral, evidence of the deep scorn that the fey, in their hearts’ core, always felt for human beings. But now she realized there was something worse, that the Savage had betrayed these women, put their lives in danger … for what reason? A mix of carelessness and aggression. How many of them now had fiends or half fiends growing under their hearts, ready to slice out through their wombs, as the Savage had murdered his own mother? Tears in her eyes, she left him and crawled out though the mouth of the barrow into the open day.
In pain, the Savage tried to shift his body. His hands were manacled in front of him, the chain looped around the druid’s body. Moving, he disturbed her and she moaned a little. Looking down, he saw her eyes were open.
“What did your father do to you?” she whispered.
He found he didn’t want to tell her. Chained to her, his weight partially on top of her, he was suddenly embarrassed. “My father was in prison for a long time,” he said. “Then he was set free. This was in Ascalhorn, near the high forest. He was a warrior, scion of a noble house. A royal house. He fought against the armies of Seiveril Miritar. But he was defeated and driven from his family’s ancient citadel. His cousins were gathering for another assault. But he had lost his heart, and he didn’t want to fight anymore.”
In fact he’d scarcely known his father. He didn’t know why his father had done the things he’d done. He knew he had fought with Sarya Dlardrageth in the great war. Then he was gone to the Sword Coast, to Baldur’s Gate, where he lived secretly. Whether he’d been banished or had run away, the Savage never knew.
“And … what did he do to you?”
How could he have lived among humans, the Savage thought, unless he had done to himself what he had done to his only child, maimed himself, thrown away his own power? But the Savage didn’t know anything about that, or about the person who had been his mother. He had been raised by servants, trained in the warrior’s way. He found he didn’t want to talk about it.
But he felt the druid’s hands move over his back and down his spine. Marikke had made no effort to be gentle, and had hurt him and healed him at the same time. But these hands were different, tentative and soft. He imagined Eleuthra was trying to comfort him. But the pressure of her fingers caused a pain that was not physical.
“I hate the fey,” she said, close to his ear. “I’ve always hated them. So I hate you, even though you didn’t fight like one of them. You fought like one of us.
“Almost like a man,” she explained, and she touched him lower down. “Gwynneth Island was a paradise until your people came.”
This corresponded to no reading of history that the Savage had ever heard. Before the fey had come to Myrloch, the people of the island had slaved in penury, scratching out a living so the House of Kendrick could live in splendor, as they still did in Alaron. Northlanders and Ffolk had squabbled over trifles, constantly at war, hacking each other to pieces in their stony glens.
But whatever. He felt her fingers on his leg. And he imagined the two women, Marikke and the druid, between them were bringing back his strength, making him whole. Grateful, he turned toward her, and found her staring up at him with blue-black eyes.
“There’s something—here,” she said. “Something old.” She wrinkled her nose. “The stink from your body masks it. Makes it hard to find.” She stuck out her long tongue. “You don’t think these chains can hold me?” she asked. “Nothing can. Because it disgusts me to touch you. To be so close to you. Don’t look at me. Don’t move.”
He closed his eyes. He could hear her breath, smell it, feel it on his face. That was how he
became aware of her transformation, the sweet smell of her turning rank and acrid as she turned. He felt the wolf hide that had covered them retract across his body. Once, in Callidyrr, he had shared the bed of a rich merchant’s wife, and as she slept she had pulled the blanket from him inch by inch, leaving him exposed and prickling with cold, as now. She had known what he was. Anyone who’d seen him naked could not help but know.
But now the beast was struggling against him, scratching with her claws, frustrated by the bonds meant to hold a human woman. The wolf struggled free.
The lycanthropes were insufficient at anything that required care or sustained attention. Chaining people up, guarding prisoners, imagining contingencies, were not their strengths. Marikke could easily have predicted the druid would transform herself. That she did not take precautions, the Savage thought, reflected her ambivalence. And perhaps Kip didn’t care if he went free. In a good hunt, the quarry needed time to run and hide. The longer the time, the more uncertain the outcome, the richer the sacrament, the happier the kill.
“Go,” he said.
She stood above him now, her great paws on his chest, and she bent down to lick his face. Her breath was thick and foul. Tentative as a woman, weak from loss of blood, she seemed stronger as a beast. She yawned, and shook her heavy shoulders, hurting him.
“Go,” he repeated.
But she leaned down and took the chain between her teeth. She worried it, and dragged his hands forward until he saw the manacles were loose around his wrists. The rusted ironwork had come loose when she freed herself. She pulled him forward, and where Marikke had sat he saw a knife on the ground, a knife of hammered steel with a blade like a beech leaf. The healer must have dropped it. The blade was strong enough to break apart the rusted links.
The Rose of Sarifal Page 13